Stalin, Volume 1

by Stephen Kotkin

  166. Bushnell, Mutiny amid Repression. See also Fuller, Civil-Military Conflict, 144–55. In May to July 1906, mutinies resumed (again more than 200 total), and the old order seemed doomed, a second time.

  167. Gurko, Features and Figures, 7. See also Daly, Autocracy Under Siege, 176; and Lieven, Russia’s Rulers, 216.

  168. Stepun, Byvshee i nesbyvsheesia, 304.

  CHAPTER 4: CONSTITUTIONAL AUTOCRACY

  1. Loukianov, “Conservatives and ‘Renewed Russia,’” 776 (citing A. I. Savenko to N. K. Savenko, April 28, 1914: GARF, f. 102, op. 265, d. 987, 1. 608).

  2. Vereshchak, “Stalin v tiur’me”; Tucker, Stalin as Revolutionary, 117. The circumstance that these recollections date from January 1928, rather than the 1930s, and that they appeared in an emigre publication, not in an official Soviet publication, adds credibility.

  3. Borges, “The New Czar.”

  4. Gilliard, Thirteen Years.

  5. Tagantsev, Perezhitoe, 35–6. See also Kokovtsov, Out of My Past, 129–31.

  6. M. A. Taube, “Vospominaniia,” 171, ms., Bakhmeteff Archive, Columbia University. On the institutional structure, see Szeftel, Russian Constitution; and McKean, Russian Constitutional Monarchy.

  7. Maklakov, Pervaia Gosudarstvennaia Duma, 59–117; Emmons, Formation of Political Parties, 21–88.

  8. Mehlinger and Thompson, Count Witte, 313–29.

  9. It did not help that the physical giant Witte happened to be Alexander III’s spitting image and that the latter’s portrait—looking uncannily like Witte—hung in Nicholas II’s study as an intimate, constant rebuke of the tsar’s inadequacy relative to his father. Nicholas II would later ascribe a “truly Easter-like peace” in his heart at news of Witte’s death (among other factors). Witte would observe, “I was born a monarchist and I hope to die one, but I hope there will never again be such a tsar as Nicholas II.” Anan’ich and Ganelin, “Opyt kritiki memuarov S. Iu. Vitte,” 298–374 (at 299); Vitte, Vospominaniia [1960], III: 336.

  10. Borodin, Gosudarstvennyi sovet Rossii, 49; Aldanov, “Durnovó,” 39.

  11. The intrigues associated with Stolypin’s assumption of the premiership remain murky. Russkie vedomosti, July 1, 1906: 2 (Miliukov); Kokovtsov, Out of My Past, 146–56; Shipov, Vospominaniia i dumy o perezhitom, 445–8, 457; Miliukov, Vtoraia Duma, 226; Miliukov, Vospominaniia [2000] I: 380; Ascher, P. A. Stolypin, 110–14.

  12. Various operations failed to fix the deformity. Ascher, P. A. Stolypin, 15.

  13. Ascher, P. A. Stolypin, 44–6, 88–90, 94–6; Fallows, “Governor Stolypin,” 160–90; Waldron, Between Two Revolutions, 189, n30 (RGIA, f. 1276, op. 3, d. 959, l. 75).

  14. Sidorovnin, Stolypin, zhizn’ i smert’, 197; Daly, Watchful State, 34.

  15. Kryzhanovskii, Vospominaniia, 209–21.

  16. Robinson, Rural Russia, 130; Hindus, Russian Peasant, 91–2.

  17. Mehlinger and Thompson, Count Witte, 288–41.

  18. Shchëgolëv, Padenie, V: 406, 411, 415 (Kryzhanovsky); Lauchlan, Russian Hide-and-Seek, 115–23; Ruud and Stepanov, Fontanka 16, 111–6.

  19. Waldron, Between Two Revolutions, 106–14.

  20. The tsar was obliged to summon the Duma for only two months every year. In addition, there is good indication that Prime Minister Goremykin, Witte’s immediate replacement, and Nicholas II conspired to allow the Duma to remain in session only so long as to discredit itself in the eyes of the public. The Duma was dismissed—and so was Goremykin. Verner, Crisis of Russian Autocracy, 332–4. Even after the advent of the Duma, Nicholas II, speaking to the German ambassador, remarked of the autocracy, “there can be no other system with half developed nations: a crowd wants a firm and rough hand over it . . . I am the master here.” Rogger, Russia in the Age of Modernization, 19 (citing Seraphim, Russische Portrats, I: 250).

  21. Ascher, P. A. Stolypin, 205–7. According to the new electoral law, two thirds of the electors (in the electoral college) were from gentry and propertied merchants, leaving one third for peasants as well as urbanites and workers. Entire regions of the empire, such as Turkestan, received no representation. Harper, New Electoral Law; Doctorow, “The Russian Gentry.” Nicholas II appears to have viewed the new electoral law of June 3, 1907, as the first step back to unbridled autocracy. Wortman, Scenarios of Power, II: 527.

  22. Stockdale, “Politics, Morality and Violence.”

  23. “Memorandum by Professor Pares respecting his Conversations with M. Stolypin,” in Lieven, British Documents on Foreign Affairs, VI: 180–4 (at 183). See also Waldron, Between Two Revolutions, 58–62.

  24. Quoted in Klemm, Was sagt Bismarck dazu?, II: 126.

  25. Steimetz, Regulating the Social; Beck, Origins of the Authoritarian Welfare State; Hennock, Origin of the Welfare State.

  26. Kotsonis, Making Peasants Backward.

  27. See the suggestive, idiosyncratic interpretation of George Yaney in Systematization.

  28. Vitte, Vospominaniia [2000], I: 724 (letter to the tsar). See also Macey, Government and Peasant.

  29. Gagliardo, From Pariah to Patriot, 238–42.

  30. Karpov, Krest’ianskoe dvizhenie, 94–7; Frierson, Aleksandr Nikolaevich Engelgardt’s Letters; Leroy-Beaulieu, Empire of the Tsars, II: 45–6; Kofod, Russkoe zemleustroistvo, 23.

  31. Pallot, Land Reform in Russia, 31.

  32. Thus, to speak of a general “high modernist” governance style is profoundly mistaken. Scott, Seeing Like a State.

  33. Ascher, P. A. Stolypin, 11 (quoting S. E. Kryzhanovsky).

  34. Yaney, “The Concept of the Stolypin Land Reform.”

  35. On the economic flexibility of the commune, widely noted by contemporaries, see Grant, “The Peasant Commune,” esp. 334–6; Nafziger, “Communal Institutions”; and Gregory, Before Command, 48–50. About 80 percent of communes were “repartitional”; the rest, mostly in the Polish-Lithuanian borderlands, were hereditary, where usage rights were better and some transfer rights existed. There were no communes in the Baltic provinces or Siberia.

  36. Atkinson, End of the Russian Land Commune, 71–100; Pallot, Land Reform in Russia; Dubrovskii, Stolypinskaia zemel’naia reforma. But also see Blobaum, “To Market! To Market!”

  37. Davydov, Vserossiiskii rynok v kontse XIX-nachale XX vv. i zheleznodorozhnaia statistika. See also Tarasiuk, Pozemel’naia sobstvennost’ poreformennoi Rossii. In addition, peasants had few horses: an estimate for 1912 indicates 36.5 percent of peasant households had no horses, 40.4 percent had one or two, and 1.9 percent had four or more. Jasny, Socialized Agriculture, 147–9.

  38. Chernina et al., “Property Rights.” Sometimes, conversely, the communes themselves suddenly eliminated their divisions into strips to consolidate contiguous farms. Yaney, Urge to Mobilize.

  39. Dower and Markevich, “Do property rights in Russia matter?”

  40. The November 1906 agrarian reform, supplemented by other measures, would formally pass in the Duma and State Council, and be approved by the tsar, in June 1910. Polnoe sobranie zakonov Rossiiskoi imperii, XXX/i, no. 33743: 746–53. The tsar approved a worker insurance bill only after Stolypin was dead.

  41. The 1907 electoral shift away from nobles in the professions (Cadets) to landed nobles in the provincial zemstvos enabled the latter to fight against Stolypin’s attempts to extend and open up local self-government. Wcislo, Reforming Rural Russia. See also Weissman, Reform in Tsarist Russia.

  42. Diakin, “Stolypin i dvoriantsvo”; Waldron, Between Two Revolutions, 115–77, 182–3; Borodin, Gusdarstvennyi sovet Rossii.

  43. Elwood, Russian Social Democracy.

  44. Lane, Roots of Russian Communism, 11–155, 21–8; Zimmerman, Politics of Nationality. In November 1901, the Tiflis Committee had officially become the Georgian branch of the Russian Social Democratic Workers�
� Party, essentially uniting with the Russian party though never losing its self-standing quality. The Duma representatives of the Social Democrats were predominantly from the Caucasus—the orators Tsereteli, Zurabov, Makharadze, and Ramishvili. Jones, Socialism, 223; Kazemzadeh, Struggle for Transcaucasia, 187.

  45. Emmons, Formation of Political Parties, 146–7.

  46. Perrie, Agrarian Policy, 186. The SRs claimed to have 350,000 people “under constant party influence.” Radkey, Agrarian Foes, 61–3.

  47. Rawson, Russian Rightists, 59, 62; Spirin, Krushenie pomeschchik’ikh i burzhuaznykh partii, 167; Stepanov, Chernaia sotnia, 107–8.

  48. Rogger, “Formation of the Russian Right: 1900–1906,” 66–94.

  49. Lowe, “Political Symbols.” See also Bohon, “Reactionary Politics in Russia”; Brock, “Theory and Practice.”

  50. Brunn and Mamatey, World in the Twentieth Century, 891. The only contemporary equivalent was the late nineteenth-century/early twentieth-century right-wing street-and-ballot-box mobilization of workers and lower middle classes in Habsburg Vienna, the capital of another polyglot empire, also with a dynasty and large Jewish population. Schorske, Fin-de-Siecle Vienna, 116–80.

  51. Liubosh, Russkii fashist.

  52. After its publication in the St. Petersburg periodical, an expanded version of the protocols was issued in book form in 1905 by Sergei Nilus, who complained that no one paid them serious mind. Nilus stayed in Russia after the Bolshevik revolution and finally attained fame for being the publisher of the protocols. Despite multiple arrests, he was always released. He died in 1929. Cohn, Warrant for Genocide, 90–8.

  53. De Michelis, Non-Existent Manuscript. This finding supersedes the earlier hypotheses that the scurrilous “document” was compiled from French anti-Semitic tracts spurred by the 1890s Dreyfus affair and the first international Zionist Congress (Basel, 1897) and midwifed by the okhranka. Rollin, L’apocalypse de notre temps.

  54. Rawson, Russian Rightists, 75–106, 172–224.

  55. In Kiev, a Polish-speaking and Jewish city surrounded by an Eastern Orthodox, Ukrainian-speaking hinterland, rightists had shown the way, employing street agitation and the ballot box to take hold of the Municipal Duma in 1906. Ukrainian-speaking peasants in the southwest overwhelmingly sent Russian (Eastern Orthodox) nationalists as their representatives to the State Duma. Hillis, “Between Empire and Nation”; Meir, Kiev. On conservative efforts to organize in 1912–13, see Diakin, Burzhuaziia, 54–55, 169–70.

  56. Kryzhanovskii, Vospominaniia, 153–4.

  57. Lauchlan, Russian Hide-and-Seek, 278–80.

  58. Krasnyi arkhiv, 1929, no. 32: 180.

  59. Ascher, P. A. Stolypin, 121–7, 173–4; Ascher, “Prime Minister P. A. Stolypin”; Geifman, Thou Shalt Kill, 99–100.

  60. Rogger, Jewish Policies, 232; Lowe, Antisemitismus und reaktionare Utopie.

  61. Rogger, “Russia,” 443–500.

  62. Kuzmin, Pod gnetom svobod, I: 170.

  63. Loukianov, “Conservatives and ‘Renewed Russia’”; Newstad, “Components of Pessimism.”

  64. Kokovtsov, Out of My Past, 164–5; Gurko, Features and Figures, 497–8; Ascher, P. A. Stolypin, 138–42; Lauchlan, “The Accidental Terrorist.”

  65. The last chief of the tsarist okhranka denied complicity in the pogroms while referring to Jewish profiteers “who could simply not be accustomed to earning its livelihood by any means other than business or trade.” Vasilyev, Ochrana, 101.

  66. Rawson, Russian Rightists.

  67. There were 112 voting delegates—62 Menshevik-leaning, 42 Bolshevik-leaning, and the rest representatives of the Bund and Social Democrats of Poland and Lithuania, Latvia, Ukraine, and Finland. Georgians comprised a quarter of all Menshevik delegates but were wary of what they saw as the fickleness of the Russian Mensheviks. Jones, Socialism, 213.

  68. A leading scholar called Georgia “the most successful Social Democratic movement in the Russian empire before 1917.” Jones, Socialism, xi. Jordania would claim that Social Democracy in the Caucasus, more than in any other part of the empire, was a multicultural movement, but this was not true. Zhordaniia, Moia zhizn’, 38–9.

  69. This position was also advanced by the Bolshevik delegate S. A. Suvorin. Chetvertyi (ob’edinitel’nyi) s’ezd RSDRP, 339; Zhordaniia, Moia zhizn’, 34; Arsenidze, Nicolaevsky Collection, box 667, folders 4–5 (interviews with Arsenidze, July 1961); Jones, Socialism, 63–4, 69, 95–6, 124. Arsenidze was arrested the same month as the 4th Congress, April 1906.

  70. Later, after Jughashvili became Stalin and dictator, his Russian-Bolshevik roommate at the Stockholm hotel, Klim Voroshilov, would recall not the substance of any policy proposals by the Georgian but his ability, in private, to declaim Pushkin as well as Shakespeare, Goethe, and Whitman in Russian translation. Voroshilov would also recall the future Stalin in Stockholm as “stocky, not tall, around my age, with a dark-complexioned face, on which there were scarcely noticeable pockmarks—the vestiges, perhaps, of childhood smallpox.” Inevitably, Voroshilov also found the Stockholm Stalin to have “remarkably radiant eyes,” and to be “completely suffused with energy, cheerful and full of life.” Voroshilov, Rasskazy o zhizni, 247. Voroshilov first composed unpublished memoirs about these early events in the 1920s. RGASPI, f. 74, op. 2, d. 130; op. 1, d. 240. See also Trotskii, Stalin, I: 112. Stalin also stood out as not being from the noble caste of the west Georgia countryside, unlike Jordania, or Orjonikidze. Ostrovskii, Kto stoial, 568–72.

  71. Smith, Young Stalin, 197; Geifman, Thou Shalt Kill, 222–5.

  72. Weissman, “Regular Police.” Imperial Russia had also introduced so-called land captains (zemskie nachal’niki) into villages in 1889; they, too, were roundly despised. Beer, Kommentarii.

  73. Altogether, political terror claimed at least 17,000 people killed and wounded in the last decades of the tsarist regime. Geifman, Thou Shalt Kill, 21, 264, n. 57, 58, 59; Hoover Institution Archives, Boris I. Nicoalevsky Collection, box 205, folder “Lopukhin,” protocol 37: 59–66.

  74. Spiridovich, Istoriia bol’shevizma v Rossii, 120.

  75. Geifman, Thou Shalt Kill, 249.

  76. Lauchlan, Russian Hide-and-Seek, 245 (citing GARF, f. 102, op. 295, d. 127, and Hoover Institution Archives, Nicolaevsky Collection, box 205, folder “Lopukhin,” protocol 37: 59–66). Fewer than 200 people had been executed for political crimes between 1825 and 1905. For peasant resettlers traveling eastward, the government provided special boxcars to transport accompanying livestock and farm equipment. (During the Soviet era, these “Stolypin wagons” would be outfitted with iron bars to carry prisoners.)

  77. V. I. Lenin, “Stolypin i revoliutsiia,” Sotsial-Demokrat, October 18, 1911, in Sochineniia, 2nd and 3rd eds., XVII: 217–25.

  78. The okhranka foreign department in Paris had been established in 1884; a Berlin agency existed from 1900 to 1905. Lauchlan, Russian Hide-and-Seek, 103; Agafonov, Zagranichnaia okhranka; Patenaude, Wealth of Ideas. Russia had had a mere 3,900 internal exiles as of 1901. Back home, the police lists of persons under investigation, which in 1889 had had 221 names, by 1910 would number 13,000. Lauchlan, Russian Hide-and-Seek, 153 (citing Hoover Institution Archives, Okhrana Collection, box 157, folders 2–6).

  79. “Sovremennyi moment i ob”edinitel’nyi s”zed rabochei partii,” Sochineniia, I: 250–76, 410 n74 (at 250–1).

  80. GF IML, f. 8, op. 2, ch. 1, d. 43, l. 154 (Aleksandra Svanidze-Monoselidze).

  81. Back in September 1905, he hid with the Svanidze family in Tiflis, but he may have been hidden by them before. Kun, Unknown Portrait, 341 (citing RGASPI, f. 558, op. 4, d. 651: Elisabedashvili). Svanidze pere made a living as a railway worker, but he was a landowner and Kato’s mother (Sepora) was descended from Georgian nobility; they sent Alyosha abroad to study in Germany, indicating some means.

>   82. Ostrovskii, Kto stoial, 235–5 (citing Gori, d. 287/1, l. 8-9: M. M. Monoselidze); Dawrichewy, Ah: ce qu’on, 228; Tucker, Stalin as Revolutionary, 107; Alliluev, Khronika odnoi sem’i, 108.

  83. According to Stalin’s later teenage girlfriend in Vologda exile, Pelageya Onufireva, “He told me how much he had loved her and how hard it was for him to lose her. ‘I was so overcome with grief,’ he told me, ‘that my comrades took my gun away from me.’” Kun, Unknown Portrait, 117 (citing RGASPI, f. 558, op. 4, d. 547). Also, Stalin is said to have told his daughter from his second marriage, Svetlana, of Kato, “She was very sweet and beautiful: she melted my heart.” Montefiore, Young Stalin, 159 (citing Svetlana interview tapes in the posession of Rosamund Richardson).

  84. Ostrovskii, Kto stoial, 253 (citing Gori, d. 287/1, l. 14: M. Monoselidze, d. 39/2, l. 49–50: Berdzenoshvili, d. 146/2, l. 61: Elisabedashvili; GIAG, f. 440, op. 2, d. 39, l. 36–7); GF IML, f. 8, op. 5, d. 213, l. 43–4; RGASPI, f. 71, op. 1, d. 275, l. 31; GF IML, f. 8, op. 2, ch. 1, d. 43, l. 155: A. Svanidze-Monoselidze; Montefiore, Young Stalin, 160 (citing GF IML, f. 8, op. 2, ch. 1, d. 34, l. 317–54: Monoselidze).

  85. Gegeshidze, Georgii Teliia, 34–9.

  86. “Among the workers,” Lenin wrote in 1899, “a striving for knowledge and for socialism is growing, real heroes are emerging who despite the disgraceful condition of their lives and their forced-labor-like factory regimes, find within themselves such character and strength of will to study, study, and study, making of themselves conscious social democrats, ‘a worker intelligentsia.’” Lenin, Sochineniia, 2nd and 3rd eds., IV: 258.

  87. “Pamiati tov. G. Teliia,” Sochineniia, II: 27–31 (Dro, March 22, 1907). Mikho Tskhakaya delivered a graveside speech, too, not long before he was forced into emigration and left for Geneva. Gegeshidze, Georgii Teliia, 41–2.

  88. We shall never know how much of Teliya’s work Stalin borrowed, or how much he may have sharpened it. “They were written in parts, right there, at the printing press, hastily, on my knees, given over to the printer,” Stalin would later claim. Ilizarov, Tainaia zhizn’, 240–1. The first four appeared in Akhali Tskhovreba (New Life) in June and July 1906. That newspaper was closed, and the four articles were republished, in “generally accessible language” at the request of the editors, in Akhali Droeba (New Times) in December 1906 and January 1907. Four more articles appeared in February 1907 in Chveni Tskhovreba (Our Life), which was also soon closed, and another four in Dro (Time) in April 1907. Sochineniia, I: 294–372; the original versions of the first four, are given in an appendix (373–92). Stalin also “corrected” the articles before including them in his Collected Works, claiming they were not polished. See Vasily Mochalov notes, December 28, 1945, Sochineniia, XVII: 625–6. Mochalov was the chief of the Stalin Desk in the IMEL, and clashed with the IMEL director V. S. Kruzhkov. The Georgian affiliate of IMEL was also involved in finding the originals and in the translations into Russian. The galleys of the first volume of his Collected Works, with Stalin’s colored pencil markings on “Anarchism and Socialism?,” was discovered at the Kunstevo dacha after his death. Stalin had removed two prefaces, that of the Collected Works editor as well as his own. Ilizarov, Tainaia zhizn’, 228 (citing RGASPI, f. 558, op. 11, d. 911, l. 15; d. 910, l. 5ob).